Shofar FTP Archive File: places/germany/euthanasia/program.011

Newsgroups: alt.revisionism
Subject: T4: Nazi Mass Murder begins with "euthanasia" programs
From: Ken McVay
Archive/File: places/germany/euthanasia program.010
Last-Modified: 1995/02/13
"On November 24 ... a ghetto was set up in the eighteenth-century
fortress of the Bohemian town of Theresienstadt, to which Jews were
to be sent from throughout the Old Reich, and in particular from
Vienna, Prague and Berlin. Uprooted from their homes, penniless,
deprived of their belongings, ill-fed, overcrowded, thirty-two
thousand were to die there of hunger and disease.<66> Many of the
deportees to Theresienstadt were to be old people. But that
November morning it was 342 young men who were brought, from
Prague, to work at a construction camp, preparing Theresienstadt
for its new occupants.<67>
The first deportees reached Theresienstadt on November 30, from
Prague. They consisted mostly of women, children and old people.
A second train arrived on December 2, from Brno.<68>
Neither deportation to the eastern ghettos nor deportation to
Theresienstadt was the 'final solution'. That was still being
prepared, brought one step nearer that October, at Buchenwald, when
twelve hundred Jews had been medically examined by Dr Fritz
Mennecke, a euthanasia expert, and then subjected to 'Action 14 f
13' in a clinic at Bernburg, one hundred miles away.<69> 'Action 14
f 13' was death by gassing: a method in use since 1939 in the mass
murder of tens of thousands of mentally defective Germans in more
than a dozen special institutions.
The origin of the euthanasia killings of 1939, as of these
subsequent killings, was an order issued by Hitler, backdated to I
September 1939, the day of the German invasion of Poland. In this
order, Hitler empowered the chief of his Chancellery, as well as
his own personal physician, 'to widen the authority of individual
doctors with a view to enabling them, after the most critical
examination, in the realm of human knowledge, to administer
incurably sick persons to a mercy death'.<70> The qualifying
phrases had quickly been abandoned. In Germany, the chief of the
Criminal Police Office in Stuttgart, Christian Wirth, an expert in
tracking down criminals - took charge of the technical side of a
more 'humane' method of killing, constructing gas-chambers in which
the victim was exposed to carbon monoxide gas, 'a device', one SS
officer later explained, 'which overwhelmed its victims without
their apprehension and which caused them no pain'.<71>
Between January 1940 and August 194I, more than several thousand
Germans had been killed by gas in five separate euthanasia
institutions, by what was called sonderbehandlung, 'special
treatment - The principal victims were the chronically sick,
gypsies, people judged 'unworthy of life' because of mental
disorders, and, after June 1941, Soviet prisoners-of-war.
On 3 September 1941, at Auschwitz Main Camp, hitherto used
principally for the imprisonment and torture of Polish opponents
Nazism, an experiment had been carried out against six hundred
Soviet prisoners-of-war, and three hundred Jews, brought specially
to the camp. There, in the cellar of Block II, a gas called Cyclon
B prussic acid initially in crystal form, was used to murder the
chosen victims. The experiment was judged a success.<72>
At Buchenwald, Dr Mennecke had continued with his own experiments.
'Our second batch', he wrote to his wife Mathilde on November 25
from the Zum Elefant hotel in nearby Weimar 'consisted of 1,200
Jews who do not have to be "examined"; for them it was enough to
pull from their files the reasons for their arrest and write them
down on the questionnaires.'<73>
Five days after Dr Mennecke's second experimental selection
Buchenwald, Reinhard Heydrich decided that, considering 'the
enormous importance which had to be given to these questions', and
in the interest 'of achieving the same point of view by the central
agencies concerned with the remaining work connected with the final
solution', that a 'joint conversation' should be held by all
concerned. Such a discussion was especially needed, he wrote on
November 29, 'since Jews have been undergoing evacuation in
continuous transports from the Reich territory, including Bohemia
and Moravia, to the East, since 15 October 1941'.<74>
Heydrich's conference was called for 2 January 1942. Before met,
one further experiment was to be tried, near the remote Polish
Vlllage of Chelmno. There, on the evening of 7 December 1941,
seven hundred Jews arrived in lorries. They had come from the
nearby town of Kolo, having been told that they were being taken to
a railway station at Barlogi, ten kilometres from Kolo, and thence
to work in 'the East.'
Michael Podklebnik, one of the Jews assembled by the SS at the
Jewish Council building in Kolo, but himself registered as a
resident nearby Bugaj, later recalled how 'I brought to the lorry
my own father, my mother, sister with five children, my brother and
his wife and three children. I volunteered to go with them, but
was not allowed.' Podklebnik also saw how a Jew by the name of
Goldberg, the owner of a saw-mill, 'approached the Germans with a
request to be appointed manager of a Jewish camp in the East. His
application was accepted and he was promised the requested
position.<75>
It was not to Barlogi railway station, however, but to a small
villa known as the 'Palace' or the 'Mansion', on the road to
Chelmno, that the seven hundred Kolo deportees were brought; and
kept there overnight.
On the following morning, December 8, eighty of the Kolo Jews were
transferred to a special van. The van set off towards a clearing
in the Chelmno woods, a few miles away, on the River Ner. By the
time the journey was over, the eighty Jews were dead, gassed by
exhaust fumes channelled back into the van. Their bodies were
thrown out the back of the van, and it returned to the Mansion.
After eight or nine journeys, all seven hundred Jews from this
first day's deportation from Kolo had been gassed.<76>
For four more days, until December 11, the lorries came to Kolo.
Each day up to a thousand Jews were deported, as they believed, to
the 'East' to agricultural work, or to work in factories. Michael
Podklebnik later recalled how, on the last day, when it was the
turn of the sick Jews of Kolo to be deported, the drivers were
advised 'to drive carefully and slowly.'<77> All went to Chelmno,
the sick and the able-bodied alike, men and women; and all were
gassed there on the morning after their arrival. The new scheme
was now in being: the deportation of whole communities 'to work' in
the so-called 'East', a deception which was followed by the
immediate murder of the community by gas." (Gilbert, 238-240)
Gilbert's Notes:
<67> Zdenek Lederer, Ghetto Theresienstadt, London, 1953, page 14.
<68> Ibid., page 15
<69> International Military Tribunal, Nuremberg, documents
NO-426 and NO-429.
<70> International Military Tribunal, Nuremberg, document PS-630.
<71> International Military Tribunal, Nuremberg, affidavit by
Dr. Konrad Morgen, 19 July 1946 (Morgen was an SS officer who
had investigated SS corruption). See Raul Hilberg, The
Destruction of the European Jews, New York 1961 (Harper-Colophon
edition, 1979, page 561.
<72> Information provided by Dr. Kazimierz Smolen, Auschwitz
Museum and Archive.
<73> Letter of 25 November 1941: International Military Tribunal,
Nuremberg, document NO-3060.
<74> Heydrich letter of 29 November 1941: International Military
Tribunal, Nuremberg, document PS-709.
<75> Testimony of Michael Podklebnik (Michael Podchlebnik):
Wladyslaw Bednarz, Das Vernichtungslager zu Chelmno am Ner,
Warsaw 1946, pages 46-53.
<76> Testimony of Andrzej Miszczak, Kolo, 26 June 1946: Ibid.,
pages 46-53.
Work Cited
Gilbert, Martin. The Holocaust: A History of the Jews of Europe
during the Second World War. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston,
1985.

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